1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic still camera and more specifically, it relates to an electronic still camera capable of ultra high-speed continuous shooting for capturing ultra short stop-action sequences of the subject.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are electronic still cameras in the known art that engage an image-capturing element constituted by arraying a plurality of pixels two-dimensionally to capture an image of a subject, read out image data from the pixels at the image-capturing element and record the image data at a recording medium. This type of electronic still camera operates in a single shot mode in which a photographing operation is performed for a single frame when the shutter button is pressed and a continuous shooting mode in which the photographing operation is performed repeatedly while the shutter button is held down to continuously shoot over a plurality of frames. In addition, the continuous shooting mode includes normal continuous shooting in which images can be recorded at any compression rate, high-speed continuous shooting in which images can be recorded only at a specific compression rate and in a specific image size and multi-continuous shooting in which a photographing operation is performed over a specific number of photographic frames that is set in advance.
However, there is a problem in that even when a photographing operation is performed in the continuous shooting mode at the electronic still camera in the prior art, the continuous shooting speed is not high enough to capture ultra short stop-action sequences of the subject.